This article was originally published in The Abolitionist: A Journal of Libertarian Opinion Volume II, Number 8, November 1971, pp. 4-5.
By Roy Halliday
The rebels at Attica claim to be political prisoners while the government supporters call them militant black revolutionaries. Both contentions seem to be self-evidently true. The rebels certainly are prisoners and the prison system is necessarily a vital subset of the political system. So they are political prisoners in a redundant way. The prisoners are predominantly black and, since they were acting in a revolutionary way, it is also evident that they are black revolutionaries. Further investigation is not required to bear out the accuracy of these contentions. It is more important to decide whether these facts should be regarded as good or bad.
From all points of view in which the government has a legitimate moral role, the inmates deserved what they got, since to give in to their demands would jeopardize the State. If the Attica prisoners had been given what they demanded it would have encouraged other prisoners to rebel and could have led to the destruction of the American prison system. Since the prison system is the heart of the government, the rebellion of the prisoners was properly labeled anarchic.
From the point of view of those who want to preserve and protect the government (Nelson Rockefeller, for example) it was necessary to resist the prisoners' demands and to discourage future uprisings by massacring the inmates, even at the risk of the lives of the hostages.
From the libertarian point of view, however, an action is not automatically wrong simply because it weakens the State; in fact, that should be a point in its favor! Let us then evaluate the issues of justice involved from several different libertarian premises. First, from the total pacifist point of view (that it is always wrong to use violence) the prisoners were wrong for taking hostages and destroying prison property, but it was also wrong for the government to keep them in prison and to massacre them. The proper thing for the prisoners to do was to peacefully petition for their rights. This, of course, would have gotten them nowhere, but that is where total pacifism leads.
Next, consider the "eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth" school of thought. In general, if you believe in punishment of criminals you cannot endorse the attempts of criminals to escape punishment. Probably, some of the prisoners were not criminals in the view of libertarians; for instance--if they were convicted of drug use, tax evasion, gambling or other "crimes" without victims. Other inmates at Attica undoubtedly were criminals--murderers, thieves, etc., and, therefore, from our current premise deserved to be punished.
In lieu of a "free" society in which everyone is free to punish criminals as they see fit, with or without a trial, only the State can enforce "justice." The libertarian punishment advocates must choose between two mutually exclusive things--their desire to have criminals punished, and their desire that innocent people be free.
There is a third libertarian premise possible and it is the one which I advocate; that violence without consent is legitimate in self-defense against aggressors, but illegitimate at all other times. From this premise it follows that it is wrong for the government or anybody else, to hold people as prisoners. Prisoners are people who are locked-up against their will by violence (usually for the purpose of punishing them for having broken a rule of the State and to discourage others from disobeying the law.) This can hardly be classified as self-defense of non-aggressors. In fact, those people who are "criminally insane" and might actually be a threat to innocent people are locked up in mental hospitals rather than in regular criminal institutions. It is legitimate then to use violence in self-defense to escape from prison and it is criminally aggressive to use violence to prevent prisoners from escaping. In other words, all men have the inalienable right to self-defense and, therefore, no one has the right to threaten or use violence for any other purpose.
What the prisoners at Attica did wrong was to use the guards as hostages. It was not wrong to overpower the guards and escape their control, but once the guards were rendered helpless it was wrong to threaten their lives. It is understandable that, knowing the nature of the State and the desperate situation they were in, the prisoners would not behave in a meticulously moral way, but it seems that the rebels were not such incorrigible criminals as the State troopers who actually did the shooting! In the name of self-defense, shouldn't the troopers be locked up before the less dangerous rebels? And what about Nelson Rockefeller, the ringleader of the troopers; isn't he a greater threat to more innocent victims than all the prisoners combined? Libertarians should regard all prisoners as victims of government oppression and work for their freedom.
Back to Pieces from My Radical Libertarian Period
Back to Libertarian Essays by Roy Halliday
This page was last updated on August 6, 2000.
This site is maintained by Roy Halliday. If you have any comments or
suggestions, please send them to
royhalliday@mindspring.com.